1. Field of The Invention
Broadly speaking, this invention relates to buffer amplifiers. More particularly, in a preferred embodiment, this invention relates to a buffer amplifier for use with ripple-carry generators of the type that employ multi-phase logic.
2. Discussion of the Prior Art
As is well known, a ripple-carry generator comprises a plurality of cascaded stages, the output of each stage being connected to the input of the next. Typically each stage of the generator includes a multi-phase logic circuit having several FET transistors and an MOS output transistor.
Unfortunately, because of the fact that a ripple-carry generator comprises many cascaded stages, the capacitance that must be driven by the output MOS device in a given stage is the total string capacitance of all the remaining stages in the generator together with any interconnect capacitance which is in series with it. This unwanted capacitance tends to slow the operation of the ripple-carry generator and is, hence, undesirable.
One way to eliminate this undesired capacitance would be to increase the physical size of the devices in each stage, but to be effective this increase would have to be substantial and the increased demand for silicon area would make it impossible to fabricate the generator using integrated circuit techniques.